


Across the dreaming ocean

by Beleriandings



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Femslash, Valinor after the Darkening, dreams and nightmares and visions, Ósanwe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 02:49:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2796884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the days after the Darkening of Valinor, Anairë struggles to rebuild her life and her relationship with her best friend, Eärwen, and to find her place in the court of king Arafinwë. Meanwhile, at night she is troubled by visions of her children’s lives across the sea…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The silence between them is deafening, at first.

Anairë’s world has changed, utterly. She walks about the empty house sometimes, trailing her fingers along the walls, tearing her eyes away from the closed doors of her children’s rooms. Of her own and Ñolofinwë’s room. She does not sleep there.

She returns to her mother and father’s house, but even that is not the same. The years and her marriage into the house of Finwë have left her a stranger even to them, she sometimes thinks. The thought is always followed by a sickening sense of guilt, for everyone is so  _kind_. Yet they do not speak to her as they once did, their voices gentle but wary, kind but distant.

What she wants is to cling to someone and sob until her throat hurts, but they all seem more disposed to take her hands and whisper quiet words of condolence that surround her like fragile birds. So she raises her head and nods her thanks, face studiously, desperately, blank.

She packs and leaves her family once more, and takes the familiar road back up to the summit of the hill of Túna.

She thinks of approaching Indis and Findis, for a while, but she stops herself before the thought has truly become more than a wild notion. They have their own grief, likely of the staid and proper sort, not like the wild thing that claws at her chest from the inside. Besides, she knows somewhere in the dark places of her mind, that it is not them whose company would ease her heart.

When she finally lets herself think of Eärwen, her course seems almost simple.

She laughs at that, bitterly, for it is anything but simple.

And yet, too soon (it is but a short walk) she finds herself at the palace once more. The gardens’ smell and the way that sounds echo in the stone courtyards are so painfully well-known to her that it feels like a punch in the chest, yet the artificial light makes it all look strange and unfamiliar.

And then she is announcing herself to the porter – no, she does not want an audience with king Arafinwë, she is here to see queen Eärwen – and being led up the stairs to the rooms set aside for the family.

Eärwen is in what was once the music room. She holds an elegantly inlaid Telerin lute in her hands, her fingers moving at random across the strings, the sounds coming from it not really music. Anairë wonders if it was Findaráto’s. Eärwen is gazing out of the window into the lamplit courtyard below, her face blank. Her river of molten silver hair has been cropped short, flicking around her jaw, and underneath the skin of her neck looks delicate and vulnerable. Eärwen’s warm brown skin is a shade paler than she was when Anairë last saw her, but of course in this darkness, she reminds herself, that is true of everyone. Anairë watches her for a moment from the doorway, gathering her courage to speak, before Eärwen’s head snaps around suddenly to look her in the eye.

“You wanted to speak to me?”

Eärwen’s voice is cold, but not cruel. There is a forced neutrality to it, her body tensed in utter stillness.

“Eärwen” says Anairë, closing the door behind her. “I’ve…” she swallows, taking a breath. “I’ve missed you.”

Eärwen’s eyes rake over her face, the light of the lamps reflecting in them. She puts the lute down, too quickly.

“I know why you might not want to see me” says Anairë, drawing in a measured breath. “I know… your people… your family….” Her breaths quicken. “What Findekáno did…”

“Your eldest son participated in the slaying of my people” says Eärwen, tonelessly. She cocks her head. “Are you here to apologise on his behalf? Beg my forgiveness for him?” She narrows her eyes. “Or are you hear to assure me that Ñolofinwë will see that my  _own_  children do not come to any harm?”

Anairë hesitates a moment longer, thinking.  _Deciding._ She lets out her breath. “Neither.”

Eärwen raises an eyebrow.

“I’m here to say that I miss you” she says, spreading out her hands before her. “And… that, well, we were dear friends once. I would that we were again.”

Eärwen’s eyebrow is raised a little higher. “Friends? We were, yes.”

Anairë waits patiently for Eärwen to continue.

“I have missed you too” confesses Eärwen, speaking as though to herself. “But I don’t know if I can look at you without… without thinking…” her head tips forward, her head falling into her hands.

By force of habit, and before she realises what she is doing, Anairë is at Eärwen’s side in the window seat, her arms around Eärwen’s shuddering shoulders. Then, for a brief time she fears that Eärwen will pull away, but she does not. She merely turns towards Anairë, arms pulling her close.

Anairë holds Eärwen as she weeps, head resting on that familiar silver hair, inhaling its scent.  _Strange_ , she thinks. She had spent so long wanting to cry like this herself, but now her eyes are dry.

Eärwen raises her head, looking up at Anairë with raw, defiant eyes. “I have missed you too” she says again. “Stay with me for a while?”

They begin to spend more time together, as they once had, but it is not the same, Anairë feels. Yet she does not care, for Eärwen’s company is keeping her alive day by day.

“Sometimes” says Eärwen, one day as they sit drinking hot spiced tea and staring out into the darkness through the window, “I think that I am the lucky one. Arafinwë came back to me.”

Anairë tilts her head, considering. “I do not know how I would have felt about Ñolofinwë returning.”  _Especially if he had left the children to follow Fëanáro without him_. She does not say this to Eärwen, but their mental connection has strengthened once more lately, and when Eärwen’s head turns to look her sharply in the eye, she feels herself colour. “I mean…”

But if Eärwen truly caught the thought, she makes no sign, but merely carries on. “I mean, I never truly saw it in him to travel across the sea.”  
“He is doing well by the Ñoldor as king” says Anairë carefully.

“Well enough, given the circumstances, I suppose. I help.”

Anairë feels herself smile. “I never doubted it.”

“He is troubled” says Eärwen, her face clouding. “He gets headaches for days at a time. Indis is worried. Arafinwë always had the dreams, the visions, stronger than any of the rest of the family… now they trouble him more than ever, I think, but he closes his mind to me. I suppose he does not want to worry me, but I can tell.” She smiles faintly. “I get them too, you know.”

Anairë nods. “I remember.” Years before, they had sat by the fire in this very room, Eärwen’s head falling on Anairë’s shoulder as she drowsed, when Eärwen had suddenly jerked violently awake, shuddering and wild-eyed. When Anairë had held her and asked her what she had seen, Eärwen had merely shaken her head, and Anairë had not enquired further. Now though, she could guess.

“They are not as strong or as vivid as his, for which I give thanks for my own sake, at the least.”

Anairë thinks for a moment, letting their minds brush each other with the lightest of touches of ósanwe. Eärwen’s eyes flicker up to meet hers. “No” she says. “Before you ask, I cannot see what is happening.”

“But we know that the ships were burned. We know that they chose to cross the Ice” says Anairë. “If you were to concentrate there, maybe…”

Eärwen grits her teeth. “Do you think I have not  _tried_?”


	2. Chapter 2

King Arafinwë has set up regulations for lamp use, to still the sudden alarming rise in the price of lampstones, for there are few enough left in Tirion who are skilled in the making of them, these days.

Eärwen’s hair is starting to grow longer, and she does not cut it short again. Anairë is growing used to seeing the many shades the silver takes in the now-ubiquitous lamplight. It seems to drink up colour, she thinks, taking it and scattering it like the waves of the sea.

Anairë dreams of ice. She dreams of snow, blowing in her face, of whiteness. White is not a common colour to see anymore. She sees faces amidst the whiteness, sometimes, faces contorted in pain, frozen hair whipping against wind-burned cheeks. Some she recognises. Some are her children. She does not know if the dreams are true or prophetic in any sense, or just some product of her fears.  _Why did you lead them on that road Ñolofinwë?_  She hears her own voice, desperate in her head, just as she hears his reply.  _Because there was no other, and no turning back._   _You know this, my love. Our children know it too._

She tries not to think of him too often. Yet, when she wakes crying out and drenched in cold sweat, in her cold bed in the dark, it is hard not to remember how his arms had held her close, his warm kisses pressed to her brow when she was anxious, his low, calming voice in her ear. She no longer knows when it is appropriate to sleep and when to wake; Tirion has a schedule, a time when it is decreed that it is day and a time for night. A sensible decision on the king’s part, she knows, but the days largely pass her by. The world is dark all the time, so there is little true difference.

Sometimes, she thinks of Eärwen as she had been before.  _The days in which they had left the city together, taking some horses and a little food wrapped up in a scarf and riding out of the city with only the two of them. Sometimes she would accompany Eärwen to Alqualondë for a whole season or more. Anairë had grown up in Tirion, and was used to life on the tall hill of Túna with its towers and walled gardens and steep stony streets. But she had known that the humid, frenetic life of the city and even the court of king Finwë had ever weighed heavily on Eärwen, used as she was to Alqualondë with its sea breezes and wide open market squares and the sound of the ocean always within hearing._

_In those days they had taken joy in each other’s company, picking up shells on the shore, stripping off their boots and outer clothes and paddling in the shallows. Sometimes they went into the forests around Tirion too; that long, baking hot summer when Eärwen had been pregnant with Findaráto and Anairë with Turukáno they had spent so much time simply sitting by the riverside in the dappled shade, as Findekáno played in the slow, shallow stream, shrieking in delight at the cool water and shaking his sodden hair like a puppy shakes water from its fur._

_Then there were the days in the palace, of which there were more than those outside the city. The court sessions which each sometimes came to, the balls and the feasts and the lords and ladies who gossiped behind their hands about the latest exploits of some member of the royal house._

_Eärwen was good at not letting whispers hurt her. She always laughed them off, her eyes flashing, with a toss of her long silver hair. Anairë thought if it had been her, then she would not have found it so easy, but she was the kind of person who rarely did anything worthy of gossiping about, she realised early on after coming to court. That was what all the rest of the family was for._

She thinks back on those times with a deep ache in her heart, and turns over in bed, trying to sleep. She sees their faces in her dreams.

Findekáno singing defiance into the white wind, trying to keep the people’s spirits up, desperate to prove to himself that he is still who he always thought he was. (She wants to hold him in his arms and tell him that she forgives him for Alqualondë. That in itself horrifies her a little, but he is her son, the boy who had played in the shallow stream bed, laughing in delight, whose hair she had braided in exasperation after he came home with twigs and mud matted into it once too often. The child who always seemed to have scabs and scratches on his skinny elbows and knees. Who had wanted only to protect his people from what he thought was an attack even then. She knows she is too weak to resist forgiving him, utterly and unconditionally.)

She sees Turukáno, his eyes raw pits of pain as he screams silently, biting down on his lip until it bleeds. The blood freezes on his skin, and he leans his head forwards and clings to little Itarillë as though he is drowning, or they both are. ( _Where is Elenwë?_  She wonders at first. When she guesses the truth, she cries out aloud in horror and curls her hands into fists, nails cutting into her palms.)

There is Irissë, too, her face a determined set, her jaw raised as if she means to fight the very air, the ice and the cold that burns through clothes and saps at the spirit.

Arakáno, her sweet youngest child, looks as though storm clouds are chasing each other across his gaze. She remembers when he was young, he would have unpredictable moods that lasted for days, when he would refuse to speak at all. She thinks of him as she had last seen him, the resemblance to Ñolofinwë clearer than ever in his face, and she thinks of the way that sometimes Arakáno’s courses are strange, rash and unpredictable, and she is afraid, although she does not yet know what she fears.

And Ñolofinwë is there too, although she sees him less clearly than she sees them. Driving them all onwards with his face set, his eyes blazing with anger and pain. He is what keeps them together, the whole host. She cannot look at that strange new face of his for too long, like and yet unlike the man she loves, and often when she catches a glimpse of him she wakes again, momentarily disorientated.

She wishes she did not have the dreams, and yet she wishes that she had more of them, that they were clearer. She yearns for the merest glimpses, cherishes them even though they pierce her heart like cold blades.

She begins to spend more nights at the palace, rather than go to her parents’ home or her own and Ñolofinwë’s old house. One night when she is lying awake, staring up at the finely moulded plaster cornice, there is a quiet knock on her door. “Anairë?”

Eärwen’s voice. She sits up, pushing back her hair. “Yes?”

The door opens a crack, and Eärwen slips through, dressed in a light, flowing nightgown of Telerin silk. All of Eärwen’s clothes seem to flow, which makes sense to Anairë, somehow. Eärwen is a small, delicate slip of a thing where Anairë is tall, with strength in her upper body. Eärwen is light steps and musical laughter and wears layers of rippling silk where Anairë worries and speaks the right elaborate courtesies and wears the heavy Ñoldorin court garments that she has become so used to. But it was always so.

Eärwen edges into the room, barefoot and holding a candle which she sets on the bedside table, closing the door behind her with a quiet click. “I hope I did not wake you. You weren’t asleep, were you?”

Anairë rubs her eyes, which are prickling with tiredness. “I wouldn’t really call it  _sleep_ , no.”

Eärwen takes Anairë’s hand between her own much smaller, warmer ones. “I know you suffer. You do not speak of it, but I see it.”

 _Of course she does. She cares enough to look for such things, and not to let me hide them even from myself._  Anairë feels a sudden renewed rush of affection for her friend. “I worry” she says. “I do not know what is going on and I fear… I fear…” she hesitates for a moment. “Eärwen?”

“Yes?”

“Have you seen anything?”

Eärwen’s face falls. “I see little but snow and ice, and darkness.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I think… I think Elenwë…” she cannot bring herself to say it. “Eärwen, please, if you’re hiding anything from me, to try to shield me from - ”

Eärwen frowns, all pretence gone. “She fell. Turukáno tried to save her, but…”

“He saved Itarillë.”

“He did.”

They sit in silence for a while. “You can see then, a little” says Eärwen at last.

Anairë’s words come half as a sob. “Broken visions, nightmares. Guesswork, based on that.” She balls her hands into fists. “I just wish I  _knew_ , Eärwen.” She looks up into Eärwen’s face in the candlelight, watching her intently. “If… if you saw something, clearly, I mean… you would tell me, wouldn’t you? No matter what it was?”

Eärwen’s hesitation is almost imperceptible. “Yes” she says, holding Anairë’s hands in her own and bringing them to her mouth to kiss the backs of her fingers. “Of course I would.”

Arafinwë, Indis and Findis leave to spend a week on Taniquetil with their kin. Eärwen stays behind. Anairë watches as she stands on the tips of her toes to kiss Arafinwë in the courtyard and feels a little stab of renewed pain, unexpectedly sharp.

That night she and Eärwen talk longer than they should, until they are both drooping with sleepiness. Feeling able to sleep,  _wanting_  to even, is something that Anairë has grown unaccustomed to lately, but Eärwen’s voice and the ease of their talk has lulled her. The lantern light makes the room glow, and Eärwen’s laugh is quiet, breaking the night-silence and the darkness.

They talk, faces close together, and their hands meet, and suddenly clasp, without either of them quite knowing how.

And then, quite unexpectedly (or perhaps she had expected it, Anairë thinks later, somewhere in that secret part of her mind that she rarely lets herself go to) their lips are meeting in a delicate, brushing kiss.

Anairë draws back first, blinking. “Eärwen, I…”

“Do you want me not to?”

Anairë’s mind reels, still full of the kiss. “No. I want… I want…”

“Hush.” Eärwen places a light finger over Anairë’s mouth, her expression unreadable. Then she smiles, brilliantly and truly, and their lips are meeting once more, crushing together with a little too much force.

As they fall back into the bed, in each other’s arms, all Anairë can think is  _oh. So this is what I have been seeking for._ She is astounded that she had never seen it before.

Eärwen’s small hands are undoing the buttons down the front of her tunic, and Anairë’s legs are tangled in all that flowing silk, and the smell of Eärwen’s hair and her bright, quiet laughter are all around, overwhelming, filling Anairë’s senses. Eärwen’s hand slips beneath her tunic, sending a little shock of pleasure through her that comes with a sharp ache of reminiscence.

She pushes this last aside, resolutely letting Eärwen fill up all her senses, letting the sensations running through her at the touch of Eärwen’s hand – now slipping down between her thighs, a tiny smile showing on those delicate features – the kisses on her throat, her collarbones, her breasts. _There is no one else here but her and me._

Their bodies seem to fit against each other perfectly, just as their minds had all those years, quick hands drawing gasps, pleasure and urgency and final relief. In the golden haze that follows, they curl up together amongst the rumpled blankets, and Anairë revels in the simple act of holding another person for the first time in so long.

Eärwen smiles up at her. “I just sometimes miss you” she says as though picking up a conversation broken off, stroking Anairë’s cheek.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

They drift to sleep, clinging to each other. In the morning, Anairë wakes to find Eärwen gone.

She hardly dares to hope that it will happen again, but it does, every so often. Even after Arafinwë has returned, sometimes their long talks of an evening will turn into kisses, to touches, to lazy caresses and drawn-out pleasure, as the fire burns low in the grate. For herself, Anairë draws comfort from Eärwen’s presence, as she always has. The nightmares come less often now, she finds, especially on nights when Eärwen knocks discretely on the door and lets herself into the room, shaking her silver hair and slipping off the day’s troubles like a heavy cloak.

Yet there is always something that troubles Anairë about those visits, tugging at the back of her mind. One day they lie with their limbs tangled together, facing the wrong way in the bed. Anairë is admiring the play of firelight across Eärwen’s warm brown skin, when the words simply come to her, falling from her mouth in a rush.

“Does Arafinwë know?”

Eärwen leans back to look at her. “Yes” she says without hesitation, matter-of-fact in her tone. “We lay our minds open to one another, and I love him too much to hide something like this from him.”

Anairë is a little taken aback by Eärwen’s casualness. “And… he does not…” she casts about for the right word.

Of course Eärwen supplies it, her mind touching Anairë’s briefly. “Object? No. Do not worry, Arafinwë knows that I love him well. He also knows that I love you, but that what I share with you is in no way the same as what I share with him, and thus the two are not in conflict.”

Anairë blinks. “It seems very simple when put like that.”  _I love you, Eärwen had said_ , is all that she can think.  _She says she loves me._ The thought is somewhat distracting.

“Is it not simple?” Eärwen cocks her head, quizzically. Suddenly her face darkens a little. “If Ñolofinwë were here, would you seek to hide this from him?”

 _Would she? Surely_ , she thinks, _if Ñolofinwë were here this would never have happened in the first place. If Ñolofinwë were here, it would mean that the Dark had not come and Finwë had not been slain and Fëanáro had not left, and everything in the world would be different, for surely Ñolofinwë would never choose any other course than the one he had._ “I do not know” she says, at last.

Eärwen’s face falls, as though she has just received a piece of news that she had feared, but had, perhaps, long expected. “You would not do this” - she gestures with her hand, taking in the two of them, the bed, the room at large – “if he was here.” It is not a question.

Anairë thinks about that for a while, and decides she cannot lie to Eärwen. “I suppose not.” In truth, she could barely have conceived of such a thing in their old lives, but in this new, dark world, all manner of strange turns of events seem possible. “That doesn’t mean it does not bring me joy though.” She kisses Eärwen, to reassure her. “I love you, too, I think” she says, stunned at how the words sound in her mouth. 

Eärwen smiles, slowly, and it seems to Anairë as though the whole room brightens a little.


	3. Chapter 3

Eärwen does not come to her every night. There are the times when Eärwen is with Arafinwë, and Anairë lies alone in the dark, the thoughts churning in her head. These are the nights when she cannot keep the dreams away, when they claw at her with dark fingers.

It is not one of these nights that it happens.

That particular night, Eärwen is there, already sleeping beside her, curled in her arms. Anairë is pleasantly warm, and just beginning to drowse, when her mind sudden goes blank and she sees a vivid flash of something very bright, then very dark. A head of curling black hair, the grim set of a mouth, a battle cry echoing in her head, shouted from a raw throat. Steel clashing against steel.

Then there is blood, and all she can do is watch, a mute observer paralysed by horror.

She sees blood seeping between fingers that try desperately to hold a wound closed, hears voices shouting for help, but – with the abstract sense of certainty one has in dreams – she knows it will come too late. The fingers are stained with blood, which gushes and pulses from a gash in the stomach of a warrior whose face she cannot see. She watches impotently, frozen, the force of the blood flow decrease to a trickle, and then to nothing at all. People crowd around, wailing in grief. With a shock she realises that the one cradling the dying warrior is Ñolofinwë, his hands slick and scarlet, his face streaked with tears. Slowly, a horrible suspicion rises in her, coiling and choking like smoke.  _No. Not him. Please, no._

She wakes with a jerk, wild-eyed and sweating, panic sluicing through her.

Eärwen sits up, eyes opening wide. She grasps Anairë’s hands.

“What is it?”

“Eärwen” she says. “I think… I think something has happened to one of my children.” She hesitates. “You didn’t see…”

But Eärwen is shaking her head. “I saw nothing. Perhaps Arafinwë would have though, he is far-sighted…”

“Will he be asleep? Can we wake him?”

“Anairë, even if something has happened… are you sure you want to - ”

Anairë nods grimly. “Take me to him.”

Arafinwë is still awake when they enter the royal study, sitting in the desk chair with his eyes glazed, far away. His fingers are pressed to his temple, and even as they watch his face twists a little in pain.

“Arafinwë?” Eärwen goes to him, pulling Anairë along by the hand, kneeling before her husband and stroking his cheek in tender concern.

His eyes snap open and his gaze clears, slowly. He blinks a few times, taking them both in. If he finds it odd that Anairë had been in bed with his wife, she thinks with some small part of the back of her mind, he shows no signs of it.

He takes Anairë’s other hand, his face pitying enough to rip a hole through her heart. “Anairë…”

“Arafinwë, what has happened?” This is Eärwen, for Anairë does not trust herself to speak. “Have you seen anything?”

“It is… Anairë, it is your youngest son.”

 _Arakáno._  Horror congeals in her throat, making it impossible to speak, to breath. “No” she chokes out, at last, and then “tell me… what happened?”

Arafinwë looks sorrowful. “They were attacked. Arakáno tried to lead the charge, to slay the orc captain…” he blinks, looking almost surprised. “He… succeeded. But his wounds… he bled to death soon after, in Ñolofinwë’s arms. I am sorry.”

Anairë does not breath. She struggles fruitelessly for some words to say, any words, even as a sudden memory comes to her unbidden.

_She and Ñolofinwë had argued before he had left, on the steps of their house where all could see them, but she had not cared. Not then; she was too furious to feel shame at the many eyes that were upon her._

_“How dare you take them all with you?”  
“Anairë, they chose this, freely.” He had laid a hand on her arm, and his voice had been quiet, deliberate. “There is a place for you with us too, if you want it. I beg you to reconsider.”_

_She had flinched away from him, in rage, his gentle tone only angering her further. Her fingers had gripped his arm like a vice, wanting to bruise. “You know I cannot come.” She had stared helplessly at her children, like an animal in a trap, her voice turning to pleading against her own will. “Promise me, Ñolofinwë. Promise me you will keep them safe. Promise me you will never leave them.”_

_His face had frozen for a moment, and he had nodded solemnly, and sworn it._

Now those words ring once in her head, filling it until she thinks she may go mad.  _You promised, Ñolofinwë. What of your promise? How could you let him die?_

All she can do is stand with her mouth half open, stupidly. “No” she whispers. Her youngest son, her sweet brave boy. “No, no, no, no…”

Then Arafinwë and Eärwen are holding her between them, and within the circle of their arms she lets herself break into pieces, sobs tearing through her like lances made of ice.

A few days later she is sitting in the palace library when the first of the new lights appears in the sky, trying to read and not taking in a word. Her eye is caught by the gleam of pure white, distorted by the mullioned window. She gets to her feet, eyes wide, and goes immediately to seek Eärwen.

They stand out in the courtyard together, where a little crowd of people – lords and ladies and guards and servants alike – has gathered to stare up in wonder. The light is strange, like nothing Anairë has ever seen before; it is vaguely reminiscent of Telperion, a close enough approximation to assure one of its source, but unlike enough as to be disorientating. The light is flat, for one thing, a pale, uniform glow quite unlike the silver shimmer that had hazed the air in days of old. Shadows look quite different.  _And yet_ , she thinks,  _in its way it is beautiful_. The thought leaves her feeling nothing. She looks at Eärwen; the light doesn’t look so flat in her silver hair, and now Eärwen’s hair even looks almost the same colour as it once had, in the silver nights so long past. Anairë only realises that Eärwen has taken her hand when Arafinwë comes out of the palace, standing upon Eärwen’s other side and taking her remaining hand. He glances at her, the expression in his deep blue eyes (Vanyarin eyes, Indis’ eyes, and so like Ñolofinwë’s and Findekáno’s that it hurts to look at them sometimes) changing like quicksilver, but she had not missed the look he gave her. A look of pity, of condolence. She knows he can see her pain and is only trying to be kind, but it does nothing so much as make her feel hollow, somehow.

She looks at Eärwen. She is smiling, and she turns to Arafinwë, raising his hand to her mouth and kissing his knuckles. They look back upwards for a while, the three of them in silence amongst the whispering, exclaiming crowd, necks cricked backwards and a pale circle imprinted in their eyelids from staring for too long.

“It  _moves_ ” says Arafinwë, after a while, wonder in his voice, and Anairë realises he is correct.

“What does it mean?” she asks.

Eärwen looks straight at her, her face aglow in the light. “It means  _hope_.”

Yet still Anairë cannot force herself to smile.

The Sun rises. Once, she knows, the warmth on her face would have brought her as much delight as it brings to the crowds that flock in the streets of Tirion, simply letting the warm light wash over their skin. The fiery Sun is a little more like to Laurelin than the moon is to Telperion – for in the same way as the Trees, one cannot look at the Sun for too long lest it hurt the eyes – but it cheers her very little. All she can think of is her youngest son, bleeding to death in Ñolofinwë’s arms, the others grieving.  _Ñolofinwë, where did you bury Arakáno? Did you say solemn words as you laid our youngest child in the ground? Or did you burn him, on a great pyre?_ That had been the custom by Cuiviénen, she had heard. And then that last, greatest question that gnawed at her, taunting.  _Does this mean that Arakáno will return soon?_ She does not even dare to let herself hope for that. Instead she lets the same thoughts circle through her mind again, fluttering in her head like trapped birds.


	4. Chapter 4

Arafinwë is a good king, she thinks; he has a kind of quiet charisma and grace that makes his subjects love him, without the brash rhetoric of Fëanáro. He is sensible, diplomatic and restrained (although not withdrawn from his people) which is what the times call for. 

He is also rather apt to notice people’s states of mind.

One day, after leaving his councillors behind to spill out into the great entrance hall, their feet ringing upon the elegant flagstones, Arafinwë has a page summon Anairë to him in his study.

She suspects that it concerns Eärwen; she has seen his looks at the two of them, his gaze filled with meaning that she cannot quite read. Is she just imagining the hurt there? Jealousy, even? Still, she feels incapable of summoning up more than the barest flicker of nervousness.

She comes in and he inclines his head, offering her freshly brewed peppermint tea from a large and beautifully glazed pot.

“Sit”, he says, smiling his easy smile, and she does.

Once she is seated, they sit in silence for a while, as Arafinwë watches Anairë and Anairë watches the fragrant steam rising from her cup. Some people are hard to sit in silence with, she thinks; Arafinwë is not one of them.

“This light has brought new hope to our people” Arafinwë says at last, gesturing at the golden stream of sunlight that pours in through the window. “But you, I think, are still grieving.”

She nods. “Sometimes I wish it was like it once was. I never used to dream prophetic dreams before.”

Arafinwë smiles faintly, regretfully. “I know that feeling. I get them too, you know. Before… Alqualondë… I dreamed.” He shakes his head. “I saw blood on the shore, in the water. I did not know what it meant then, and so I followed Ñolofinwë, for that was what I had always done.” He gives her a sharp look. “Sometimes it is a curse, truly. I do not know if my courses would have been different if I had not dreamed it before. But sometimes I do wish I never had, if only to save myself the pain of the might-have-beens.”

She turns to him. “You couldn’t have stopped it.”

He sighs. “I know.” His words seem to hang unfinished in the air between them. He looks back at her. “The slaying of the Teleri at Alqualondë, and your son’s part in it, stands between you and Eärwen.”

“Yes” says Anairë, stiffly.

“That day stands between me and my wife, also.”

“She knows that you were not involved. That you did all you could.”

“I led our children into that. Left them to follow my brother. And as much as I love and trust Ñolofinwë…” he tails off, shaking his head.

 _Don’t leave them, Ñolofinwë_. The words sounded in her mind.  _Promise me you won’t leave them._

“They are under his protection. They are safely across the Ice and building up their kingdoms in the new lands now, no doubt.” She hopes she has been able to keep the touch of resentment from her tone.  _For Arakáno is not with them_. _There will be no kingdom for him, no freedom or triumph, honour or glory, or any of the other rhetoric Fëanáro had used. Only the flat grey of Mandos, that endless labyrinthine tomb, until the Valar see fit to free him._

Arafinwë nods, and his voice is mild. “True.”

They lapse into silence for a little while longer, the taste of peppermint filling Anairë’s mouth and nose as her tea cools in its cup.

“Eärwen needs you” says Arafinwë. “Just as much as she needs me.”

Anairë opens her mouth to speak, but he stops her. “I want nothing from you. I did not bring you here to reprimand you, or warn you, or anything like that. I summoned you to tell you merely that the Teleri largely do not share our dreadfully proper Ñoldorin ways, and social norms relating to this kind of…  _arrangement_ … well, Eärwen sees them differently. And so do I, by now.”

She smiles faintly. “Ah, so we  _do_  have an arrangement.”

“If you wish it.”

“I do. I know that Eärwen does.”

“Good” he says, and finishes his tea.

Time passes, and Eärwen is there often. She is so kind, Anairë thinks, kinder than she herself has ever done anything to deserve. Arafinwë is there too, sometimes, engaging her in conversation in the palace gardens, trying to distract her and cheer her, she knows. She remembers what Eärwen has said of his dreams;  _sometimes they are vivid, frightening, and true. Sometimes they come accompanied by blinding headaches, that last for days._ And yet always he appears calm and golden-bright, the perfect king. She feels a rush of affection for him, for she truly appreciates his efforts, and the concern in his blue eyes.

Years pass, and the pain curls into a small hard lump in her throat, weighing down her heart. She still dreams, but they are never as vivid, and do not come with the same sense of fear, to her great relief. They also seem to make less sense than they once had, or perhaps it is her than can no longer make sense of them; she sees Findekáno astride a giant eagle, and Ñolofinwë wearing Finwë’s crown, although she cannot think how either could be true. She treasures every sight of their dear faces anyway. She sees Turukáno asleep by the side of a river, his eyes flickering beneath his lids as he dreams. The vision fills her with affection. He was always a sweet-natured child, meticulous and thoughtful, and he had loved stories. One day, she sees Irissë riding through the dark woods, her white cloak streaming behind her. There is a look on her face of fierce joy, as though she has just been given the world on a plate.

She sees Irissë more after that, but the dreams grow dark, confused, disturbing. There is a hand twisting her arm, fingers digging into flesh. A dark haired child whose face she can never quite glimpse. It is always dark in those dreams, dark and airless. Anairë does not understand them, but she fears for her daughter, a sickening, ever-present dread.


	5. Chapter 5

The days in Tirion are bright now, the life of the city returning almost to how it had been before the Darkening. Anairë finds it a little surreal. Sometimes she goes out into the market square of the city and simply watches people about their daily business. She wants to shake them, scream at them. She wonders if any of them have the sight, if she could ask that man with the red-gold hair, or the woman with the twin daughters tugging at her skirts what was happening to her children on the other side of the sea. One never could quite tell immediately when looking at someone, she knows.

Nerdanel is seen in Tirion sometimes these days, she hears. She even sees her once or twice, from far off. Nerdanel goes out wearing a cloth tied over her bright, distinctive hair, but Anairë knows her old friend by her gait, her every movement. Nerdanel’s face is proud and studiedly impassive, as though carved by her own hand from unyielding marble.

Several times, she thinks of speaking to Nerdanel; she knows Indis does. But Indis is  _kind_ , kinder than Anairë herself, she thinks, and can always find the right words. When Anairë tries to think of what she may say to Nerdanel, it always seems that her hypothetical words slip from her grasp before they are fully formed, bleeding away from her. And so the years pass, and she says nothing, though shame weighs heavily on her for it.

One day Anairë finds Eärwen standing in the empty throne room, contemplating the mosaic that covers the vaulted ceiling. Arafinwë had held court there that morning, but now the people have left, save for a few servants and the guards outside, and Eärwen herself.

She comes to stand at Eärwen’s side, gazing up along with her. The ceiling is very beautiful, set with gilded tiles that catch the light, and gems of many colours amidst the more ordinary glazed tesserae. The design is a great web of interconnected golden bands, decorated with the most intricate of geometric patterns. At each node of the great knot, there is placed one the sigils of all the old noble houses of the Ñoldorin people, and then on the outer ring the insignia of the guilds, as they had stood before the exile. The system had largely fallen into disuse and then obsolescence when most of Tirion’s artisans and craftspeople had left to cross the sea; she remembered Ñolofinwë speaking bitterly of how Fëanáro had ever had the guilds’ almost unconditional support, though he gave little thought to their interests, truly. The ceiling is a mere historical curiosity now, Anairë supposes, for the old order has largely been superseded, the ranks of society shaken together beyond recognition. And yet there are some noble houses there that she recognises – that of her own parents included - as well as the proud sunburst of the house of Finwë, forming an elegant centrepiece.

“The mosaic was designed by Fëanáro” says Eärwen, without looking at Anairë. “Arafinwë thinks that we should have it covered up.”

“Surely that isn’t necessary” says Anairë, a little shocked.

Eärwen turns to stare at her. “That was our  _compromise_ ” she says, anger rising behind her words. “If I were in his place, I would have taken a chisel to it, long ago.”

Anairë stares. “Truly?”

“Yes! The man who first sketched these designs also slew my kin!”

“But it is so beautiful!” blurts Anairë, before realising it is entirely the wrong thing to say.

Eärwen glares at her for a long moment. “You Ñoldor are all the same. Ever a weakness for  _beautiful_  things, even when the very presence of them…” she shakes her head, almost spitting her words “…by virtue of glorifying the  _artist_ …” she gestures at the ceiling, pointing out the eight-pointed stars at each corner “… is also glorifying an act of mass-murder.”

“Appreciating an artist’s work need not mean condoning their actions” says Anairë, uncomfortably, staring up at the marvellously intricate mosaic work. “Fëanáro had not even begun to conceive of the Silmarils when he was designing this, let alone turn truly against Ñolofinwë.”

“Yet turn against Ñolofinwë he did, and  _more_ ” says Eärwen bitterly. “Oh, so much more. I suppose I must apologise that I cannot find it in me to appreciate this particular work of beauty.” Her beautiful face twisted in a sneer, but there were tears starting in her eyes. “I’m deeply sorry that when I look at any of the works of Fëanáro’s hand, that all I can see is the blood of my kin spilled upon the jewelled shoreline. I suppose I’m truly not quite…  _Ñoldorin_  enough for your particular feats of moral contortion, even after all these years.”

And with that, she turns away from Anairë, face flushed, and sweeps from the room.

Eärwen comes to see Anairë in her room later that night. “I’m sorry” she blurts, as soon as she steps into the room. She twists the sleeve of her dress in her small hands. “I was… unkind today. I simple get very…” she breaks off, casting around for the right word, running nervous fingers through her hair, tears beginning to well in her eyes once more. Eärwen thumbs them away angrily. “I’m sorry” she says again. “It was so long ago now, I don’t know why I…”

“Eärwen” Anairë rises, going to her with open arms, and Eärwen folds herself gratefully into them, joining her hands behind Anairë’s back, “of course you are forgiven.” She raises Eärwen’s chin and looks into her eyes. “I spoke to Arafinwë after you left” she says. “He says that the lords and ladies of the council will vote against the destruction of the mosaic, unanimously in all probability. He could override the decision of course, but - ”

“But he does not want to” says Eärwen flatly, nodding in resignation. “Yes, I know. I spoke to him of it too, as it happens.” She smiles sadly. “Anairë, I appreciate the effort, but you do know you don’t need to mediate arguments between me and my own husband, don’t you?”

Anairë understands Eärwen’s meaning. “Of course.” She gives Eärwen another hug, pressing her face into that familiar silver hair.

“He also said that the mosaic could be taken apart in pieces, and placed in storage, with the statues that used to stand in the hallways. We made our peace at that.”

“I’m glad to hear it” says Anairë, and she is.

“Anairë?” 

“Yes?”

“I know you’re not one of Fëanáro’s supporters. Anything but, in fact. But you know that what happened that day at Alqualondë will always stand between us to some degree, don’t you?”

Anairë nods slowly, remembering Arafinwë’s words, long years ago. “Yes.”

“Your son fought beside the sons of Fëanáro. My daughter fought for my own kin, of the Teleri. Did you know that?”

“I… I had heard…” in truth she had never wanted to ask Eärwen or Arafinwë about the rumours about Artanis’ involvement that she had heard told in the streets of Tirion.

“It’s true” says Eärwen. “And I would perhaps have stood beside her, if I had been able.”

Anairë frowns, troubled by this. “No use dwelling on what could have happened.”

“Quite.”

There is a short, pointed silence.

“All of which is to say” Eärwen says, quietly, “that I do forgive you. If you’ll accept my apology. I didn’t mean to suggest - ”

“Sweet one, I forgave you long before you came into this room. I know how it must be for you here, what with…” she gestures around, trying to take in the whole palace, the whole world, their own lives and those of everyone they knew “…everything.”

Eärwen smiles a watery smile, kissing Anairë very gently at the corner of her mouth. “Thank you.”

Anairë is out walking when she feels that kick in her chest again, her breath hitching painfully. She grasps a pillar for support, her mind seeking for something, some sign from across the sea, and again she curses that she cannot see reliably.  _What if I could?_ She wonders, not for the first time.  _Would I dream my whole life away then, for want of the sight of my children?_ The thought leaves her frustrated, nails digging into sweat-slicked palms.

She returns to the palace immediately. Eärwen is there, running down the steps to meet her. The way that she clasps her hands alone is enough to tell Anairë that something is very wrong.

“Anairë” says Eärwen, sitting her down in the stone alcove by the side of the door as Anairë’s heart races in fear. Her voice is full of pain. “I’ve… I’ve seen something.”

“You have?”  _It must have been terrible indeed for Eärwen to see it strongly enough to be so certain. Or perhaps it does not work like that. Perhaps it is as random as the cruel chances of the world._  “What… what is it?”

Eärwen takes a deep breath. “Open your mind to me. If you truly want to know, I will show you.”

Anairë knows that for better or for worse, she must see this. She nods grimly, bowing her head so that their foreheads are touching. Not strictly necessary, but the contact calms her a little. She tries to breathe slowly and concentrate, to let her mind slip towards the edges of Eärwen’s.

There is a courtyard of white stone. A tall man with bitterness in his dark eyes glares across it, guards on either side of him. He is speaking but she cannot hear his words. He is speaking to Turukáno, she realises, rejoicing as she sees her son dressed in the finery of a king.  _This is what he wanted._  He is frowning, though. Irissë is at his side, her face pale and pinched, troubled. Anairë tries vainly to hear what they are saying as all three turn to look at another man, who is younger. She tries to make out his face, but at that very moment the first stranger with the hard black eyes pulls a dart from under his cloak, quick as a snake, and casts it at him.

She would have screamed if Eärwen had not squeezed her hand, very tight.

She watches in horror as Irissë dives in front of the weapon – she always had been fast and agile, with the quickest reflexes - blood blooming against white wool at her shoulder. As Irissë falls to the ground, the guards converging around her, Anairë is jolted out of the vision, and there is only Eärwen’s face before her once more. She stares, uncomprehendingly. “Irissë” she says. “What… is she…”

Eärwen squeezes her hands softly. “There was more, but that I would spare you” she says sadly. “The wound was… poisoned. Irissë died in the night. They could not save her.”

Anairë’s tears are slow in coming. For a long while, she simply walks around the family’s apartments in the palace, dry-eyed and pale with shock, trying to understand. She cannot force the idea through her head that her daughter is dead. In time, she and Eärwen and Arafinwë piece together the full story from snatches of visions and dreams, and yet still it does not seem to fit in her head.  _How can Irissë be dead? She was so… so…_  Anairë cannot finish the thought, for she breaks apart once more then, and Eärwen holds her in her arms until she has no more tears left to cry.


	6. Chapter 6

The next time, things are different.

The next time, it is Eärwen who is sobbing in Anairë’s arms, grief over the loss of two sons tearing through her, burning her up like fire on the inside. It had been fire that had killed Aikanáro and Angaráto, flames that ran across the fields, consuming the forests with horrifying hunger, leaving only ash. They had died back to back, fighting enemies who had burned with them.

Looking into Eärwen’s red and haunted eyes, Anairë is almost glad she can see but snatches in dreams. She remembers Arafinwë’s words. _Sometimes it is a curse, truly._

Arafinwë returns from the city that very day and immediately Eärwen is throwing herself into his arms, and he is laying his head against hers, kissing her hair, silent tears in his eyes. Anairë feels painfully as though she is intruding on their private grief. She climbs the stairs in silence, curls up on the bed and goes to sleep, her eyes dry and her heart filled with an ache of helplessness.

Eärwen and Arafinwë go to Alqualondë for a time, after that. Eärwen had asked Anairë if she had wanted to come along, but she had declined, politely. She feels at a loss with them gone. She goes to the old house where she and Ñolofinwë had lived while the children were growing up, for she knows that at least that will make her feel something.

The house is empty, just as it had been when she had left it all those years ago. She trails her fingers through the heavy layer of dust that covers the furniture. She sits down on the floor, in the middle of the hall, watching the motes dance in the shafts of sunlight that slant in through the windows. She remembers when Findekáno had fallen down the stairs; he always liked to take them three at a time, running both up and down. He carried on doing it, even after he had fallen and hit his head on the stair rail, leaving a little white triangular scar on his temple just at his hairline.

And there too are Irissë’s old riding boots, half fallen to pieces from wear. She had always insisted that she loved each pair and would not be parted from them until they had huge gaping holes in the soles. The two of them had often argued about it.

Anairë lets herself wander into the library next. She remembers the day when Arakáno had grown tall enough to reach the highest shelf; no one else in the household was, and he took great pride in it too.

She opens the high window’s shutters a crack, peering out into the garden. There is the place where Turukáno had proposed to Elenwë, in the shaded corner of the garden where the climbing clematis had once grown. All the flowers in the garden were dead now, killed by the dark years, and no one had replanted them.

She shakes her head, suddenly wondering why she had come, wishing to leave. If she stays, she thinks, she will surely go mad.

That night, back at the palace, she wakes sobbing.

_Ñolofinwë is riding out in the dark, alone, his face set with grim determination. She knows, without knowing how, that he will not return. On the battlements stands Findekáno, his face sorrowful, pain flashing in his eyes as he raises a crown to his head._

_Don’t leave them_ , she wants to shout, to scream at her husband. _You can’t leave them. There’s still Finno and Turno for you to look after, they still need you, you said you’d look after them. You promised me, Ñolofinwë, you promised me, you promised me, you promised me…_ she wishes she could beat her fists against his chest, scream until her throat is raw, as she sees once again the lost look on her eldest son’s face. As a king he is more sorrowful than she has ever known him, his face regal and dignified, but his blue eyes downcast so that few can see the pain there. She wants to rage at Ñolofinwë for leaving him all alone.

She can’t, of course. All she feels is a tearing in her chest once more, and she knows that her brave husband, her sweet king, is dead.

Eärwen returns, in time. When she arrives back in Tirion and seeks Anairë out, she immediately hugs her close, holding her to her chest. When she draws back, there is pain in her eyes and Anairë knows that Eärwen has seen what has happened too.

The two of them fall into bed with one another that night, and Anairë finds herself drinking Eärwen in as though dying of thirst. She wants only to wash the pain from her heart, to simply  _forget_ , if only for a little while. She presses kisses all over Eärwen’s chest, her arms, her stomach. She lets her lips trail downwards, letting her mouth do its work between Eärwen’s splayed legs, until she rings gasps and cries from her, finding pleasure even as Eärwen does.

Eärwen does not leave that night, but sleeps curled in Anairë’s arms. ( _For_ , she explains, _Arafinwë has had me beside him every night while we were away in Alqualondë. But you have had no one, and must be feeling neglected, and he knows how to wait for me_.)

Anairë is more grateful for the contact alone than she can possibly put into words.

Eärwen plays the lyre sometimes, or the lute that is inlaid with a beautiful design of delicate birds’ wings, cut from pale golden wood amidst dark. She sings well too, her voice low and lilting, the salt tang of her Telerin accent unconsciously growing stronger as she sings songs from her childhood. The half-familiar melodies hurt Anairë, for they recall the memory of Findekáno practicing the harp or lute or simply singing absently about the house. But it is a beautiful sort of hurt, she thinks. These rooms had once rung with the sound of Macalaurë and Findaráto’s playing too, when they had stayed at the palace. Once Irissë had hammered on the wall, shouting at the three of them play the same song at the same time or be quiet, she remembers with a smile.

Eärwen’s voice is different though; not incomparably golden-bright and rich as Macalaurë’s, nor as sweet as Findaráto’s nor as joyful as Findekáno’s, but bittersweet and somehow soothing. Eärwen’s voice is like a little of the sea, brought into the world that she inhabits day by day, and despite herself Anairë is grateful for it.

“Findaráto is dead” says Eärwen hollowly, one day, words tumbling clumsily over one another as if she longs to be rid of them. Her voice cracks. “Arafinwë saw, in his dream.” She sounds as though she cannot quite believe it herself, or perhaps that she had long expected it. Anairë knows exactly the feeling.  _Is this what our lives are to be now? A list of our dead children, counted off one after the other as the long years grind past? Would any of them choose to return, and if so then when?_ To these questions she has no answers, and neither does Eärwen. It is raining, and they sit and watch the rain fall against the palace windows, darkening the white stone to grey.

Anairë grows restless in the years that follow, for she sees little, the dreams all but leaving her. When they do come, they are unclear, all feelings and colours, always seeming about to coagulate into a true picture even as she is clawed back into wakefulness. She paces the corridors of the palace and then the gardens and the city streets, wondering what is happening on the other side of the sea. She imagines Findekáno must be a king, now. The thought is strange to her, making her uneasy, but nevertheless she feels a fierce stab of pride.  _Is Turukáno at his side?_  she wonders, hoping that her eldest boys, so different, would not chafe at each other too cruelly. And then,  _does Findekáno have an heir? Did he ever marry?_  She tries to imagine Findekáno as a father with a child of his own. He would be a good father, she thinks, and it would surely make him as happy as Turukáno had been at the birth of Itarillë. She sees her second son lifting his little daughter from Elenwë’s arms for the first time, holding the sleeping baby as though she were made of the most fragile spun glass, a brilliant smile breaking over his face. Both images, the imagined and the real, send knife-blades through her heart.

Then she remembers the ferocity with which Findekáno had fallen in love with tall, beautiful, fair-spoken Maitimo, the joy in his eyes whenever they were together.  _Maitimo, who had betrayed him._  She curls her hands into fists, knowing that Findekáno would forgive. She is not certain that she herself would have.

She sleeps little, and her eyes smart in the daytime. Eärwen, ever solicitous, notices of course.

“What if” says Eärwen one day, out of nothing, “we were to go on a trip? Just the two of us?”

They leave for Alqualondë that very evening.

They stay in the palace, and, to his credit, Olwë does not bat an eyelid at Anairë’s presence. She assumes that Eärwen and he had already come to an arrangement, for the topics of the kinslaying and Findekáno’s involvement are studiously edged around for the duration of the visit.

It is, at least, a slightly less oppressive environment than Tirion is.

The two of them sit on a ledge halfway up the sea cliffs. There is a system of caves that bores backwards far into the rock face, riddled with little natural alcoves like this one. The sound of the sea echoes strangely in the chamber behind them. Far below, the small waves lap against the rock. It is morning, and they watch the sun rise over the blue sea, in silence. The dawn is pale golden-red, shimmering and peaceful.  _Somewhere out there though_ , thinks Anairë,  _out there in the east, there is no peace. There is war and death, and my children are there in the middle of it._

Eärwen looks at her, her silver hair – now grown long, whipping across her face – lifting in the wind. “Sometimes” she says, “I think I was a terrible mother. A terrible person too.”

“You weren’t” says Anairë immediately. She thinks for a moment. “But I can see why you might think that. I think it too, sometimes, of myself.”

They lapse back into silence for a while. There is no one on the beach below them, for it is too early, but in the distance they can hear the sound of the cries of the gulls swooping over the little fishing boats that are coming into the bay around the headland, bringing the morning’s catch to the marketplace.

“Do you think” says Eärwen, looking at Anairë with eyes filled with raw emotion, “that things could have turned out any other way? Any of it, I mean.”

“Yes” says Anairë, thinking. “I think things could have turned out any number of different ways.” She looks out across the bay to the great arch that marks the harbour of Alqualondë just visible in the distance, and shudders. “But I think all of them would have led to the same place, in the end.”

Eärwen nods. “That is what I tend to think too.”

As they watch, the sun rises.

In Alqualondë, she sleeps in a little guest room, close to the sea wall of the delicate pale stone palace of king Olwë.

That night there is a storm that sends breakers up against the white walls, but she does not hear it.

Instead she dreams again, at last.

Findekáno stands upon a wide open field. His face is tipped upwards towards the sky, but his eyes are fixed on the distant horizon, his gaze joyful, brave and triumphant. The sun breaks through the clouds and its light spills across his face, clear and golden bright. He is shouting something, although she cannot hear his words. His face is rapturous, and he shines resplendent in blue and silver.  _He looks a king_ , she thinks, with a jolt of emotion. He smiles brilliantly, and puts on his helm.

Swords are drawn and battle is joined, but Anairë knows, with the strange certainty that one has in dreams, that something is wrong. Someone has not come. Findekáno is worried, she can tell, even as she watches him fight, whirling and dodging and striking out at his enemies with the practiced strength and skill of an experienced warrior.

The scene changes, and there is Turukáno, in the midst of battle. His armour is rich and fine – how little she had thought to ever see peaceable, pensive Turukáno in armour, wielding a sword, much less commanding an army – though he is covered with what looks like damp, caked ash. There is blood there too. He is frowning, craning over the heads of his soldiers, trying to see. Nervousness flickers across his grime-streaked features as he barks out an urgent command that she cannot hear.

The scene shifts once more. Findekáno’s face, or what she can see of it beneath the cheek-guards of his helm, is shiny with sweat, reflecting the fiery glow that comes down from above him. The very air seems to be shifting and shimmering with heat, like the hottest part of a forge. Her view is such that all she can see is his face, his jaw set in grim determination, his breathing coming hard. He too is covered in blood and black ash, but she can still see the blue-white enamel glimmer of his armour through it all. Suddenly there is a shining arc of silver steel flashing through the blasting heat, for Findekáno has cut outwards with his sword, a savage and expertly aimed blow that would have felled any normal opponent. But it was aimed  _up_ , she sees, and it goes wide, for suddenly Findekáno is falling to the ground, scrabbling in the ashes at his feet. He does not lose his grip on his sword even as he falls hard against the dust, knocking the breath from his body. He seems for a moment to struggle against something that is holding his legs, something bright, that glows like red flame… she hears him hiss in pain as the fiery ropes – for she knows not what else to call them - burn his hands through his gloves, though he scrabbles at the bonds to no avail.

He is still trying to scramble to his feet, his face furious and filled with hate, when it happens. She sees it coming before he does, she will think later. The great black axe that comes from above, a single crushing blow of horrifying ferocity. There is a scream of metal on metal as it strikes his helm, and then she is blinded by a brilliant flare of white, too bright to look at.

When the white haze and the spots in her vision clear, the scene has changed again. Turukáno stares in horror across the field, and as she watches his face is lit with fire, then something bright and white. Even as a soldier seizes him and pulls him to the ground, out of the path of a cruel black arrow, his face contorts into a mask of horror. His eyes are wide and his mouth open in a silent scream, as though to mouth a single word.  _No_.

“No. No, no, no…” she wakes, struggling, tangled in the light sheet. Her voice is a strangled thing as her sweat soaked hair falls into her face, choking her. “No, Finno, my sweet boy, not you too… no, no, no…”

“Anairë? Anairë, wake up.” A gentle hand strokes the hair back from her brow, holding her hands. She wrenches herself away in panic, clawing her way backwards in the bed. “Anairë, there’s no need to fear… it’s only me. You were dreaming. I heard you crying out in your sleep.”

 _Eärwen_ , she realises, as the world reassembles itself around her, the disorientation of sleeping in a new room ebbing too slowly away.

“Findekáno” she says immediately, squeezing Eärwen’s hands. “Eärwen, something… something terrible has happened.” She thinks of that great black axe. She had not been granted a glimpse of the foe that had wielded it; the visions were strange like that sometimes. (Not for the first time, she curses Irmo for his cruelty and capriciousness, caring not in this moment for blasphemies.) But the size of it alone and the strength that would be needed to wield such a thing tell her enough. That blow would have been dealt with enough force to crush metal like tissue paper, to shatter her son’s skull beneath… she runs her fingers across the crown of her own head, gingerly, horror pooling in her stomach.  _No one could survive that._

“Tell me what you saw, if you like” says Eärwen, clutching her hand. “It may help.”

For a moment, Anairë simply stares at her, blinking stupidly. Then she closes her mouth, draws in a steadying breath, and nods, trying to collect her thoughts.

She tells Eärwen everything. When she is finished they sit with Eärwen perched on the edge of the bed, holding Anairë in her arms. Anairë lets her tears spill from her, dampening the shoulder of Eärwen’s light silken bed robe, until the grey dawn begins to lighten the cloudy sky over the restless ocean.


	7. Chapter 7

The journey back from Alqualondë is a weary one. They have not the heart to walk or ride this time, and so they arrange to have themselves driven back by carriage, courtesy of king Olwë. Anairë pushes back one of the small curtains on the windows, and peers listlessly out at the mist-washed hills and field that roll past them as they draw near to Tirion once more.

“Do you think” she says to Eärwen, “that there is any possibility the dreams could not be true? That they could be just… well, just dreams, and no more? Imaginings of Irmo, sent to us to keep the Vala entertained?” Her words come out sounding more bitter than she had intended.

Eärwen’s face is sorrowful, and she leans forward across the gap between them as the carriage jolts over a bump in the road. “Anairë” she says heavily, taking Anairë’s hands in hers, “the Quendi have ever had dreams of things that are… well,  _true_. It is part of our nature. And the idea that mothers have a stronger connection to their children may or may not be more than an old tale, but… well…” she frowned. “I would dearly love to tell you that these are just dreams that we have, of our children suffering, dying. But I could not tell you something in good conscience that I am almost certain is a lie.”

Anairë nods heavily; it is the sort of answer she had expected. She shifts herself so that she is sitting beside Eärwen, rather than in front of her, thinking of Turukáno, the look on his face as his brother’s body was broken, too far away for him to help. She lays her head on Eärwen’s shoulder, thinking of her two eldest sons. They had never had much in common, and they had argued often, but she had seen the love and fierce protectiveness that had flourished beneath all that.

“Do you think” says Anairë, raising her head to glance warily at Eärwen as a new thought occurs to her, “that Finno will be allowed to return? I mean, you’ve heard what they say of the sons of Fëanáro, and after…” she breaks off.

“After the slaying of my kin, yes” muses Eärwen, her face souring a little, although her voice is flat and dry. “I have heard a lot of wild speculation, yet nothing reliable. We shall have to see what the Valar purpose.”

Anairë nods, and does not pursue the issue; Eärwen’s voice had been carefully neutral, and she thinks that if she asks Eärwen for her own opinion on the topic of Findekáno’s reimbodiment, the answer she gets may break her at last into pieces.

They return to find that Indis and Findis are at the palace with Arafinwë, having newly returned from Taniquetil. Indis embraces Anairë silently, pulling her close to her chest and holding her there. Indis’ smell is of lavender oil and old books and Anairë finds it strangely comforting. Arafinwë enfolds Eärwen in his grateful arms as soon as she arrives home. When she melts into his embrace and stands upon her tiptoes to kiss him as though they were young lovers, Anairë cannot help but feel that by now familiar little stab of jealousy, laced with irrational fear. She suppresses the feeling, as she always does. She knows that Arafinwë will not take Eärwen from her, nor will Eärwen allow him to try, but she has lost too many people now to be sure of any such thing ever again, it seems.

She thinks often of Turukáno these days. She sees him too, in her dreams and even simply in the darkness behind her eyelids when she closes her eyes. He always looked the most like Ñolofinwë of their children, and now more so than ever, a solemn king on a high throne in a cold hall of stone. She sees the sorrow in his face though, feels it coiling itself around her own heart too, constricting. He fears, just like she does, she thinks sometimes. He knows something is coming. The fall, she begins to call it in her own mind without knowing why. Turukáno does not know what he waits for either, or how the fall will come to pass. And so he wears his crown and his ring of state, as he always did, though they weigh heavily on him. He keeps his borders closed and rules his fair city, his refuge against the cruel world, and she cannot fault him for it.

When the fall comes, Eärwen knows first.

That part barely matters; Anairë has known for a long time, she supposes, wearily.

 _Morgoth_ , she thinks desperately, hugging her elbows as she forces herself to listen to Eärwen talk of flames and city walls, brief snatches of vision. The dark Vala had always looked with a wary eye upon Anairë’s secondborn son, even all those years ago in Tirion. Or perhaps she is only imagining that, stitching it into her own memories to avoid taking the blame upon herself. Turukáno had not wanted to leave, not at the beginning, she remembers. And he had suffered so cruelly, right from the first. She thinks about her tall, solemn son, imagining him refusing to leave his tower even as it falls to rubble and flame around him. She would have laughed if the situation were anything other than the nightmare she is living, for that is so  _like_  him. Ever set in his ways, refusing to move an inch. He will be allowed to be reimbodied soon, she hopes, wondering if it would be worth going to beg Ulmo personally for it.

All this she knows, and yet pain still fills her, threatening to spill over.

 _Ñolofinwë_ , she thinks.  _You promised me you wouldn’t leave them. How could you leave them behind?_

A star appears in the sky, borne by the golden messenger who comes to them from across the sea, whence no one else could. She resents him for that, just a little. (Anairë does not see him up close, and only learns later that he is her own great grandson. The thought is strange, surreal.)

When they see the star, some people in the streets of Tirion laugh and sing and shout aloud. Some drop to their knees in rapturous joy, some make signs of warding against evil, old superstitious gestures that originated even from Cuiviénen, long ago. The Silmarils – for at least all can agree that the star can be nothing else – are spoken about little these days.

Hope, they call it, as they had once said of the moon, so long ago. Anairë makes a derisive sound when she hears that, for how much hope had the sun and the moon brought to either side of the sea? How much solace was to be found for those dying in a long and hopeless war against an all-powerful enemy with an inexhaustible well of hate and malice? How much hope had there been for her own children?

And yet, she grudgingly allows, looking up into that bright white light stirs something in her. It is not quite a sense of hope, not exactly.

It is a sense of change.

One morning, Eärwen rushes into her room, silver hair flying, a sheet of paper in her hand.

“Look!” she says triumphantly, thrusting it into Anairë’s hand, never one for preambles. “The names!”

“Names?”

Eärwen catches a breath. “The names they place in the market square. A list of those to be reimbodied this year! Arafinwë just gave it to me, and I thought I should show you first.”

Anairë is suddenly alert, peering at the paper in her hands. The list has always been short in past years, but this one is a little longer. “Mandos seems to be running out of space” she says dryly. “I really think - ” she stops talking as her mouth drops open, tracing the letters of a name.

_Findaráto Ingoldo Arafinwion._

Can it really be true? She cannot speak. She looks up at Eärwen, who is grinning, her face suddenly carefree. “That’s not all.”

Anairë looks back at the paper, eyes skimming down the list, and her breath catches.

_Arakáno Ñolofinwion._

 “Our children” says Anairë, slowly. “We will… we will be allowed to have them back?”

“And the others soon, if they themselves will it.”

Her face splits suddenly into a smile, and she finds herself laughing, and sobbing, all at once. Eärwen is in her arms, and she is lifting her by the waist, spinning her in a circle so that their hair flies out behind them and they are left breathless with exhilarated laughter.

Their laughter subsides, and Anairë turns solemn. “I have heard that Námo allows family members to come to collect their… their…” she hesitates. “Anyway. I know you and Arafinwë will want to go and bring Findaráto back to Tirion together, but I…”

Eärwen is quick. “You are going to ask if I will come with you, to bring Arakáno home.”

“Yes, I was.”

Eärwen smiles, blindingly bright. “Of course I will. Besides, you are welcome to come with me and Arafinwë. I would… like you by my side too, if you can bear it.”

Anairë’s heart fills, and she lays her forehead against Eärwen’s. “Then that’s settled.”

In the weeks that lead up to their journey to the gardens of Lórien, Anairë dreams, blissfully, of nothing at all.


End file.
